During the third week of a hunger strike by inmates in California prisons, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation announced that they will make some concessions concerning the prisoners’ requests. CDCR spokeswoman Terry Thornton said that prison officials will honor some of the prisoners’ demands, contradicting a statement she made earlier this month when she declared, “"We've reviewed their demands, but the department is not going to be manipulated or coerced into action."
The prisoners, at the time of the announcement, had entered a crucial stage in which the body goes into “starvation mode.” There have been some undocumented reports that the prisoners in the hunger strike action have begun to eat, but at this point, that has been confirmed.
The hunger strike started on July 1,when some inmates at the Pelican Bay priso stopped eating to protest what they called inhumane treatment. Inmates at other prisons in California soon joined in. At the center of the protest was the allegation that inmates held in the Secure Housing Unit (SHU) are denied visits and phone calls, and are locked in their cells 22 and-a-half hours a day. Some inmates have been in SHU for over a decade.
The CDCR claims that only the most violent inmates, including gang members, are housed in SHU. Prisoners dispute that, saying that the criteria for determining gang membership is faulty. Some inmates claim that often such a designation is determined by a tattoo, which actually may not signify gang affiliation. If an inmate is deemed to be a gang member, he can sent to SHU for an indeterminate amount of time.
In order to be released from SHU, and back into the general prison population, an inmate must renounce all ties to his gang, and provide prison investigators with information on other gang members. Former state senator Gloria Romero says this is “not an option.” In a culture where “snitching” often means a death sentence, and loyalty to one’s gang is de rigueur, inmates are not lining up to tell the CDCR anything. Romero, who as a senator, fought hard for criminal justice reform, asserts that the current policy regarding keeping suspected gang members isolated is a failure, and has done nothing to rid the state of violent gang members.
The CDCR has promised to look into the policy of isolating inmates in SHU, and an unidentified spokesperson claimed that changes will begin to happen in a few months. In the meantime, the hunger strikers, and other prisoners, are rejoicing because the CDCR will be furnished them with wool hats in the winter, and they will be able to hang wall calendars in their cells. Another concession from the CDCR is to allow some educational programs to SHU residents. To those who are not incarcerated, some of the requests of the prisoners might seem trivial, and many might wonder why it took a hunger strike to get the CDCR to honor these seemingly trivial requests.
Source: NPR 7/21/11
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